George Osborne gave middle England plenty to smile about in yesterday’s Budget by cutting business rates, helping savers and taking 600,000 people out of higher rate tax. Today’s Money blog looks at the day after the night before while, in other financial news, Fidelity International has warned that the retirement income gap is not just a problem for older generations of women.
Responding to this week’s suggested solutions by the Work and Pensions Select Committee to the on-going debate around State Pension changes and its impact on women, Maike Currie, investment director for personal investing at Fidelity International, said: ‘The ongoing debate around whether state pension age changes were effectively communicated to women has drawn attention back to the retirement gap that exists between the sexes. This is not an issue of the past that we can ignore as an “older person’s problem”. The very same issues that lie behind paltry saving levels when it comes to older women still exist today. There is no magic bullet to this but we would strongly urge women to do what they can to save for the longer term as early as possible.”
Research by Which? shows that consumers could save money on home insurance premiums by haggling or switching providers, with nearly a third of respondents to a survey saying they saved an average of £82 after haggling, while policyholders who switched providers saved an average of £71.51. Almost half say they did not haggle on their existing deal and only 36 per cent changed provider in the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, research shows that savings rates are still plummeting as banks and building societies continue to cut their rates on both cash ISAs and fixed rate bonds. According to Moneywise, the top fixed rate cash ISA is just 1.5 per cent tax-free from Virgin Money and Aldermore Bank, while the best deal on the high street comes from Metro Bank at a paltry 1.35 per cent.
Looking ahead, the Council of Mortgage Lenders today unveils its gross lending figures for February. And the Bank of England will publish its monthly interest rate decision at noon. The monetary policy committee will almost certainly leave interest rates at 0.5 per cent.
Finally, according to The Times, Britain has become ‘a coffee-pod drinking, legging wearing, microwave-rice eating nation that no longer goes to nightclubs, buys DVDs and sees organic apples as indistinguishable from normal apples’. This conclusion follows the Office for National Statistics’ annual update of its shopping basket of goods that it uses to measure consumer price inflation in the UK.
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